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Bolt
Bolt is a 2008 computer-animated film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and directed by Byron Howard and Chris Williams and is the 48th film in the Disney Animated Canon. The film's plot limelights on an American White Shepherd named Bolt (John Travolta) who, having spent his entire life unknowingly isolated in a TV studio, believes that the fictional world of the TV series in which he plays the lead role is all real. When his co-star and owner, Penny (Miley Cyrus), whom he loves very dearly, is being "kidnapped" in the TV series, the dog manages to escape from the studio to rescue her. Plot The movie begins in a pet store, where a group of puppies are playing in a pen. All the puppies are following each other and moving in a pack, except for the white one, who's playing with a squeaky carrot toy. A little girl comes into the store and buys the white puppy, giving it a collar with the name tag 'Bolt'. Five years later, the girl, Penny and Bolt are in the park, when Penny receives a phone call from her father (who turns out to be a television actor, pretending to be Penny's father) telling her that "something's come up at work" and he won't be home for a while. As he warns Penny not to go back to the house, the evil Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell) sneaks up on him. Before he's interrupted, Penny's father tells her not to worry, that Bolt will protect her. A clip-montage plays, showing that her father (a scientist) has genetically altered Bolt, giving him a variety of superpowers, as well as the distinctive black lightning-bolt mark on his flank. Back to the story, Penny is using a pair of enhanced binoculars to spy on one of Dr. Calico's associates, who is speaking to him via a hologram video. Dr. Calico says that he knows how to make Penny's father reveal his secrets, and that they just need to find a "certain thing" first. Calico's associate leaves the building, and Penny and Bolt follow at a distance. They follow him down an alleyway, at which point he disappears...and then a car is seen racing towards them. Bolt runs head-on toward the car, which is flung over his head and lands upside-down behind him upon impact. Calico's associate is still alive, but trapped in the car, and Penny has Bolt hold the car (with his teeth) over the side of a bridge in order to make him tell them where Calico is. Calico is evidently in Bolivia, but by now they've been found again. Penny pulls out a fold-out scooter and zoomed off down the highway, with Bolt running by her side, as a group of helicopters and motorcycling bad guys (armed with electrified gloves) chase them. Using her helmet computer, she sees that there's a flight about to leave for Bolivia, and so they head towards the airport. During the chase, Bolt uses his various superpowers to defeat the bad guys; he uses super-jumps to leap around, heat vision to blow up the helicopters, and super-speed to pull Penny away from them. (She tells him to use the 'zoom-zoom' trick, where he grabs onto a piece of rope and pulls her scooter at very hyper super speed down the highway.) One of the bad guys pulls out a bomb shaped like a frisbee and attaches it to a gas tanker driving next to a school bus; Penny tells Bolt to 'fetch' (or "catch that frisbee bomb"), so he leaves her briefly and pulls the bomb off, leaving it on a bad guy's head. The bad guy freaks out and throws it upwards, accidentally destroying the last helicopter, and when he realizes what he's done he facepalms himself on the forehead... with his electrified glove. With all the bad guys dispatched, Penny and Bolt continue on to the airport, but before they get far they're confronted with an army of Calico's forces: helicopters, tanks, cars, soldiers, etc., that go on for miles. Penny tells Bolt to "speak" and Bolt braces himself, then lets loose with his super-bark: a supersonic boom that literally blows away the entire army. After Bolt has defeated the army, Penny picks him up and takes a picture with him on her camera, laughing him and telling him "you're my good boy". She walks off to the side and enters a trailer with Bolt's name on the side; after the door has closed, all the bad guys get up, the background lifts up and people start clearing away the wreckage, revealing that the whole thing was actually part of a movie set for an adventurous action-packed television series "Bolt". Meanwhile inside a studio, a group of staff members were entering the editing room, where the director is going through the footage from the day's shooting. Everything is going fine until they get to one shot... and there's a boom microphone visible in the background. The director flips out and starts screaming at the crew, yelling that "The dog could have seen that, he could have SEEN that!". One person in the room questions "Who cares if the dog sees a boom mike?"; it turns out to be Mindy, a representative from the network. The director tells her that in order to give the character emotional depth, they make sure that the dog thinks the entire show is real ― they hide all the studio equipment (including the cameras and boom microphones), use elaborate practical special effects, shoot a scene (without having to make any more mistakes and re-shooting a scene), and most importantly: they never let Bolt off the set, EVER. Because Bolt loves Penny and really believes he's protecting her, it gives the show an edge an acting dog wouldn't ― as the director puts it, "If the dog believes it, the audience believes it." Mindy is unimpressed, however. She says that she doesn't care about the dog's method acting, but rather that the show's predictability has become too obvious, and audiences are growing tiresome of happy endings. She then infuriatingly tells the director that if they lose so much as half a rating point, everyone in the editing room (starting with the director) will be fired. Back in Bolt's trailer, Penny sticks up the photo she took on a wall, amidst a group of other, similar photos. (she takes one whenever Bolt "saves" her.) Bolt is still freaking out because he thinks she's still in danger, so he just stands at the door and growls, in protect-mode. Penny tries to distract him, telling him she's fine and he already saved her, but nothing she does ― from feeding him to enticing him with toys, including his old squeaky carrot (in which Penny called it "Mr. Carrot") ― gets him to move away from the door. Finally Penny's cell phone rings and she has to leave, locking Bolt inside the trailer as she goes. Category:Movies